What will radio of the future sound like?

Alarm clock off. Radio on. Coffee on. This is the simple morning ritual enjoyed by millions of people each day. For over 100 years radio has given us news, entertainment and companionship. But what's ahead for the humble wireless?

In a recent AN Smith lecture in Melbourne, Katharine Viner from the Guardian delivered a terrific talk on print journalism in the age of the web. It got me thinking about what this brave new world means for radio.

17 years ago, crouched over a desk at a community radio station, editing tape with a Stanley knife and some sticky tape, I could never have imagined that one day people would listen to the radio on their mobile phones. Nor could I have guessed that in the near future, people would produce podcasts solely for online and circumvent the need for a broadcaster altogether.

When my mum was very little, as soon as it was time for the 5.00 news on the radio, her grandfather would pop a big round mint into the mouths of each of the grandkids to keep them quiet during the broadcast. They'd gather around the wireless and listen in reverent silence. That's how radio used to be: linear and fleeting. It travelled straight from the presenter’s mouth to the listeners' ears then disappeared into the ether. These days, many radio stories set up permanent digs online. They can be discovered by listeners from all over the world. People can build online forums and communities around them. Old dichotomies between consumer and content-maker have evolved into more fluid and multi-directional relationships.

In some cases, listeners can directly shape the story itself. In the recent Wilbur 101 series on Radio National’s Bush Telegraph, Cameron Wilson has been inviting listeners to be part of a pig adoption. They get to make key decisions about important stages of the pig’s life. They vote on everything from castration to labeling. It’s a great experiment to see how listeners can be directly involved in how the narrative unravels.

In other cases, listeners can literally become the stars of the show. Live storytelling programs like ABC’s Now hear this and the phenomenon of The Moth (“10,000 stories strong”) are messing wonderfully with the old rules about who gets to be the storyteller and who gets to be in the audience.

And of course, ABC Open provides its own unique opportunities for people to not just share their stories but also roll up their sleeves and get into the nitty gritty of recording and editing them. West Kimberley Open Producer Alex Smee ran some radio-making workshops and her contributors produced some of the most polished and fresh audio stories I’ve heard in a long time. They created podcasts on the subject of ‘A book that changed my life’ and some of them are crackers. We produced a similar series for ABC Goulburn Murray during DIY Radio workshops last year.

All around the world, people are now making radio from their homes – not just the ham radio aficionados, but artists and journalists and writers from all walks of life. The Paper Radio team in Melbourne make ‘stories that talk’ and post them online for people to enjoy. They have no radio station, they’re not funded by the government or by networks, it’s just them and a group of loving paid-up subscribers.

Then there's Roman Mars. He launched a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign to help fund his radio series 99% Invisible. It’s about design and architecture and ‘all the thought that goes into the things most people don’t even think about.’ He set the goal of raising $42,000 and he wound up with over $170,000. His podcasts have been downloaded over $11 million times and his site was recently ranked #2 on iTunes.

Ira Glass, the host of Public Radio International’s This American Life, recently used Roman Mars as an example of the exciting opportunities for radio makers of the future. In a 2012 address to the CUNY Grad School of Journalism, Ira mused, “In the past you could do really good work but there was no clear way to make a living off it…what Roman showed us was that if you make something good, there’s an environment now where you can make money out of it.”

Glass reflected that when he embarked on his radio career, young storytellers had to rely on foundations, grants and big institutions like radio stations and networks to get their stories to the public.

“The internet is still not settled territory…..it’s still a bit like the Wild West. So somebody just starting out, if they’re doing something original, can make something. There’s been no time in the history of reporting when it’s been so easy to get your work out to huge numbers of people and get it noticed.”

Although these developments of recent years are a bit mind-boggling, innovation in radio is, of course, not a new thing. Radio has a grand history in innovation and accessibility – from the motley crew of hobbyists and amateurs who yabbered across the airwaves in 1907 to the pirate Danes who broadcast from their ship to bypass oppressive censorship laws. And as well as employing inventive processes to get messages to the masses, radio also has a history of bold, groundbreaking storytelling. The Goon Show – ludicrous, surreal satire brought alive by electronic sound effects and musical interludes – influenced the Beatles and Monty Python. People hadn’t heard anything like it and they couldn’t get enough; it was broadcast throughout Britain, Africa, India, North America and Australia.

As early as 1938, the radio play of War of the Worlds, narrated and directed by Orson Welles, was presented as a news bulletin and was so realistic that it caused widespread panic in some quarters by listeners who took the Martian invasion to be fact. I was reminded of that broadcast recently when I came across The Truth. They’re a New York based outfit of independent writers and performers, and the story I listened to was called Sweets for the Cheat. It’s a fictional yarn, played by actors, that explores shock jock culture in radio. It packed a punch. It wasn’t real but it was true.

Much of what we now think of as cutting-edge radio seems like a reconfiguring of many of these earlier ground-breaking approaches to storytelling; a conscious mashing up of styles and media in exciting new ways. The lines between fact and fiction are becoming less clear-cut. Genres merge within the one hybrid program, rather than residing in separate, discrete units. This American Life frequently weaves documentary interviews with candid fly-on-the-wall footage, scripts, music, short stories, drama and poems.

Despite the changes in how we create and distribute radio, many of the core storytelling principals haven't changed much at all.

I think we are still guided in our work by questions like Is this a voice that you can connect to? Is the story funny, surprising, compelling, informative, provocative, poetic? Does the story suck the listener in and place them smack bang in the middle of it?

We might add a few more 21st century questions to the mix, like How can we involve the listener in this story and at what stage? How can we use online platforms and social media to extend the conversation and build a community of people around the story? How might our listeners even shape and inform the story directly?

The success of this new wave of audio storytellers is proof that radio hasn’t lost its mojo. It's reinventing itself quicker than almost any other medium. The only limitation now is our imagination and the strength of our ideas.

I’d love to hear about radio programs or podcasts that you love, and why. Feel free to share any tips and websites below.

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Comments

amira

Yup - the internet has opened things up in brave new ways when it comes to accessing audiences. What remains the same is the need for quality story telling, whatever medium you're working in. It will never go out of fashion !
Great stuff Suzi

Alex Smee

I'm with you, Suzi. It's such an exciting genre... maybe because it's ready to be moulded in so many ways. It's also appealing because people love to listen to a story. It's effortless and fun and interesting and lots of other stuff!

Terri-Anne Kingsley

On the War of the Worlds thing, Orson Welles wasn't the only person to panic people. In 1949, Radio Quito in Ecuador took Welles's script, localised it, and broadcast it. People panicked again--and, when they found out it was a hoax, they burned the radio station down. Radiolab did a story about the Orson Welles play, and about the Quito incident: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91622-war-of-the-worlds/. Fascinating listening.